Chapter I
What it celebrates
Ganesha, son of Shiva and Parvati, is the lord of beginnings: his name is spoken first in prayers, ceremonies, weddings and new ventures, and his image guards doorways. The best-known story of his birth tells that Parvati shaped a boy from the paste she had used to bathe and set him to guard her door. Shiva, returning and not knowing the boy, struck off his head in anger; to console Parvati he gave the boy the head of the first creature found, an elephant, and made him leader of his hosts, the ganas.
The fourth day of the bright half of Bhadrapada is kept as his birthday.
Chapter II
How it is kept
Families bring home a clay image of Ganesha, sometimes small enough to hold, and install it with a rite that invites the god’s presence into it. For one and a half to ten days he is honoured as a guest, with morning and evening arati A rite in which a lamp is waved before an image of a god, then offered to the worshippers. Glossary, red flowers, blades of durva grass and plates of modak.
Neighbourhoods build pavilions, pandals, for great painted images, some several metres high, with music, decorations and charitable works. At the end the images are carried through the streets with drums and dancing to the cry Ganpati Bappa Morya, “Father Ganesha, come again next year”, and immersed in water. Concern for rivers and the sea has brought a return to unpainted clay images and immersion in tanks built for the purpose.
Chapter III
Around the world
The festival is greatest in Maharashtra, above all in Mumbai and Pune, where the Lalbaug image in Mumbai draws queues of many hours. It is also widely kept in Goa, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where it is called Vinayagar Chathurthi, and by Hindu communities in Nepal, Mauritius and around the world, where images are often immersed in the sea or a river nearby.